Erica Westly on the National Soccer Alliance, the first women’s pro soccer league in the country, and how its fate relates to the current gender pay gap dispute in U.S. soccer:

The federation cited various reasons for not sanctioning the women’s league. Shortly after it folded, Rothenberg told the Washington Post that he had worried it wasn’t financially viable. “The main thing we were concerned about was that it wouldn’t make it,” he said. “If it would have fallen on its face, it would have hurt progress tremendously.” But the league had outlined a detailed financial plan in its nearly 300-page application for federation approval. To Jen Rottenberg, a lead administrator with the league, the months of meetings and paperwork that the federation put her and the players through seemed like deliberate stalling tactics. “They didn’t want the league to happen, and the general attitude was dismissive,” she said, when I spoke to her recently.

My eight-year-old, far from being bothered by the change, is fascinated by it; every time I get a piece of mail addressed to my new name, she points to it and grins as if we’re sharing some private joke. I think she’s starting to understand what this decision means for me, and sometimes she talks about the possibility of making my name part of hers one day. “I want a Korean middle name, too,” she’s told me, several times now. She might forget the whole thing, of course, or decide she is perfectly content with the names on her own birth certificate. But watching me go through this process has taught her that names and identities are not necessarily forever fixed; they can be complicated, fluid, evolving things. Names can be chosen, changed, given or lost. And sometimes they can be found again.